


Home of the Heart

by themillersdaughtersmistress



Series: Home of the Heart [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Romance, This also has the oracle from ouat but I'm not sure about her character tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-01-17 11:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1386172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themillersdaughtersmistress/pseuds/themillersdaughtersmistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was intended as a simple post-recurse fic, that grew out of hand. I'm serious. The flying monkeys have been ousted by a cloud of death.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>“You have twenty-four hours,” she told the man—Captain Hook, if he was to be believed.</p>
<p>“For what?”</p>
<p>“Twenty-four hours to prove to me that magic is real,” she responded, not liking this one bit. Henry—her sweet miracle Henry—was out there somewhere taken by who-knew-what and she was following some impossible hunch. “Then another twenty-four to find me my son.”</p>
<p>“Just forty-eight hours, love?” he questioned with a smirk, and she growled at the word love. He held up his hands in surrender. “You always were a tough one.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This idea is a convoluted mess of a result of thinking of the winter finale epilogue and the pilot of Black Sails; a lot of the plot itself springs from a particular point in this theory/meta:
> 
> (http://calculaic.tumblr.com/post/53015132125/)  
> "It seems to me, whether you want to assume it's heading towards a romantic relationship or not, it's undeniably crucial, for some reason, that Emma and Regina form a positive relationship. Someone out there desperately wants or needs that to happen. I think there are major revelations to be had about the two of them and what they can do together, even beyond saving an entire town from an apparently unstoppable force. That was only the beginning."
> 
> The mottos for this story: "canon can go fuck itself" and "gays--gays everywhere." And also, I have a fondness for OCs, so those will be running amok in this storyline. Aurora isn't pregnant, and her news to Mulan was that she was getting married to Philip, because of the aforementioned policy. 
> 
> Over on tumblr, screaming-till-im-numb is owed a huge thank you, for listening to me, going with the flow of ideas, and being the source of some later fun ideas in this story.  
> And now, onwards!

~*~

PART ONE

Enchanted Forest – Centuries Ago

The man let out a loud, mocking laugh, leaning part of his weight on the side of the building and the other part on the cage. Passerby ignored him, used to the drunken man outside the tavern, kicked out because it had closed during the night. Some stopped to peer inside the cage, but stumbled back when they saw the figure inside.

“It’s true,” the girl insisted to the man, so used to people’s reactions to the thick stitching across the top half of her face she didn’t register it anymore. She hadn’t for decades. “You are Malcolm, aren’t you?” She knew he was, but the occasional uncertainty made people less scared.

He snorted. “Yeah,” he grunted. “And you could’ve found that out easy, so don’t try it. You’re trying to push on me that I’m going to be related to fucking royalty; going to betray my boy—who hasn’t even been born yet—and he’s going to betray his own family in some war with ogres of all things; that somewhere in a mess of curses and evil slags and a land with no fucking magic, he’s going to have a grandson that’s going to bring peace to our kingdom through his parents, two women.” Malcolm tossed the picture of the grandson to the ground, and snorted again. “You’re insane.”

He got up to go, and the girl’s shoulders slumped. Turning around just before he turned a corner, though, Malcolm shouted back, “Does this muddled load at least have a good ending?”

She smiled at him, knowing he was going to forget their entire conversation with how much alcohol he’d taken in, and told him, “One of the best in a millennia.” It was her favorite.

~*~

New York – Present

“I could have you arrested, you know,” Emma Swan called the man running towards her tiredly. He’d shown up every day for a week, and even tried to tell her his name was Killian Jones. It simply wasn’t in her to fight him anymore, no matter how crazy his theories of lands with magic and her having more family than the little boy currently walking home from school just over five blocks away. It was a route he’d always taken since they’d moved to New York, and she would meet up with him just before they got home, her shift as a mal cop having just ended.

“Not likely,” he panted, skidding to a stop in front of her. “You need to come with me—I swear I…t-they shouldn’t have been able to come so quickly—”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded, a sense of unease springing up in her stomach.

“Your boy, Henry, they—” She took off before he even finished. Henry was in danger.

~*~

Wolves were waiting for her.

Well, that was wrong—they were grotesque beasts bloodied and bigger than Emma herself (and were those bees in their pelt?) and only vaguely resembled any canine she’d ever come into contact with. She managed to take down two with bullets and a lot of dodging and luck, but the third was the worst. She had to have Jones’ help for that, and even then Jones had been hurt.

The ambulance ride and subsequent release were a blur. All she could think, she could process was

Henry—home, safe—Henry—calling out—Henry—taken—Henry—“Momma!”—

Henry, Henry, Henry—

“Swan!”

She looked up from the cup of hot chocolate—when had she gotten that?—to the man sitting across from her, arm freshly bandaged (she could vaguely remember him pitching a fit at the cast they’d attempted, but how could he have gotten out of it?).

“What do you want?” she asked in defeat, voice rough. The coffee shop—and why were they in a coffee shop, her son was missing, taken by who-knew-what—was nearly empty, normal considering it was night on a weekday.

“For the record, Swan, I didn’t want this to happen,” he told her earnestly, and she almost believed him (how could she possibly—she just met him!).

“Fuck you,” she replied in the same beat tone as before. “Why the hell was my son even a target from…from—”

“The Wicked Witch of the West, as I believe she’s commonly known,” he supplied helpfully, and she barked a humorless laugh. Of course.

“And…what? You just want me to believe that? That she wanted my kid because apparently I the daughter of Snow White and Prince fucking Charming that she needs to have a hold over because somehow, all the way over in a land with no fucking magic we’re a threat?” She managed to keep her voice down, but it was a near thing.

“Actually, she needed him as something to hold over their general as well.”

She snorted. “Right—the Evil Queen, Regina.” Because where would any good Disney princess be without her villain? (And she ignored the way the name pulled at something in her, something just out of reach, if she could just remember—)

“Like it or not, it’s the truth, Swan, now do you really want to spend time arguing while your son is in the hands of that—”

She tossed her hot chocolate right in his face because—because how dare he? How dare he use her son, the one he claimed to like, as something to further his insanity? “Don’t you fucking dare try to use Henry to manipulate me,” she growled low as she stood abruptly, striding towards the door. The few customers gaped at the scene, but weren’t bothered enough to intervene.

“Swan wait!”

Against her better judgment, she paused and allowed him to hobble to catch up with her just outside.

“If you don’t believe anything I say,” he panted, using his sleeve to wipe the drink off his face. “Then think of this: you may not show it, but you’re a sentimental lass—wait, wait! I only meant to say: your boy’s name, his full name—Henry Daniel Mills Swan—where did that come from? If you can tell me, without anything else in your mind trying to interfere, to tell you some other reason than the one fighting to get into your head, then I’ll leave you to your search for your son. Then, and only then, Swan. Emma.”

Time seemed to stand still, every possible future balancing on that moment. Emma cursed herself for having to follow this hunch.

“You have twenty-four hours,” she told the man—Captain Hook, if he was to be believed.

“For what?”

“Twenty-four hours to prove to me that magic is real,” she responded, not liking this one bit. Henry—her sweet miracle Henry—was out there somewhere taken by who-knew-what and she was following some impossible hunch. “Then another twenty-four to find me my son.”

“Just forty-eight hours, love?” he questioned with a smirk, and she growled at the word love. He held up his hands in surrender. “You always were a tough one.”

Twenty minutes later, she gaped at the deck of the ship that had not been in the water before, at the smiling women staring at her like a loved one returned from war, at the smirking pirate to her side. “Welcome, lass,” Hook said with a barely contained pride, “Aboard the Jolly Roger!”

~*~

Castle of Queen Snow and King Charming, Famigier – Present

The sound of the slap rang out throughout the hall, and Snow White winced from where she was standing, restrained by the two guards at her back. Charming and Neal were similarly restrained on either side of her. She didn’t move, though—she’d learned the first dozen times that it would get her nothing good.

So, she watched as the Witch leaned down, dangerously and laughably close to being within striking distance of the former Evil Queen.

“Kneel,” the Witch hissed, eyeing the trickles of blood winding their way along on Regina’s skin with a pleasure that turned Snow’s stomach.

Regina straightened her back against obvious pain, smirking when the Witch growled. “Never,” she rasped, still smirking, and the smirk stayed when the Witch shrieked and waved her hand in another slapping motion and slammed Regina into the stone wall hard enough to shake the chandelier dozens of feet above their head.

“All the kingdoms have fallen a few, and those are weakening every day. Your wards will weaken whether you will it or not, and Famigier, Lowerhund, and Tiporo will be mine. Know when you’re defeated you insolent little—!”

“My liege,” another guard just inside the door cut off her shouting.

“What!” she snapped at him.

“Y-You wanted to be kept informed, and, well, they have him.” Dread grew inside Snow at his words, though she had no idea what he was talking about.

The Wicked Witch smiled.

~*~

“Henry!”

The blindfold was ripped off his face, and he squinted in the light. Slowly, the figure of a woman came into focus, and he strained to understand her babbling, despite the fact that it wasn’t his mom. (And shouldn’t he be more afraid? Where was mom?)

“We were so afraid they would take you—I wasn’t sure if we could get to you in time, it was so risky to go near you at all—”

“Who are you?” he asked weakly. Water—he needed water. How long had he been out? He glanced down at his wrists, where he could have sworn ropes were binding him, but the woman had both those and the blindfold in her hand. The room around the both of them was dimly lit by torches, and the light glinted off the few sparkling fixtures in it. “Where am I?”

The woman blinked, and stepped back. (Why is she green? She’s not green, something in his mind whispered. You’re just shaken from what you went through. Relax.) “Oh, that’s right,” she whispered to herself, sounding guilty. “You wouldn’t remember. I’m your Auntie Mali.” She smiled shyly.

“Mom doesn’t have a sister,” Henry answered automatically, because it had been just him and Emma for his entire life.

“Your mother Emma doesn’t,” she corrected him. “Your mother Regina does.”

“Regina?” he questioned, because he’d never heard that name before—and then groaned as memories flashed in his head quick enough to give him a headache.

A dark-haired woman smiling at him—the two of them reading comics together—“Henry, get down!” she shouted as he climbed an enormous apple tree, laughing—birthday after happy birthday—the two of them with Emma, and Emma was making the brunette laugh—

“Sorry, sorry!” Mali chanted, rushing to hoist him back to his feet, but he swayed again, head throbbing. “Regina said the curse would be strong, but I thought—oh, I’m so sorry, Henry!” He blacked out.

~*~

Regina launched herself at the Witch the second she returned to the room. The mirror the Witch had given them to see her with Henry crashed to the floor, and Regina nearly had her hands around the woman’s throat before she was thrown back.

The Witch laughed. “Oh, what’s the matter?” she asked patronizingly. “I thought you’d be happy to see your son after so long.”

“You bitch,” Neal panted, a fury to match Regina’s in his eyes, though he wouldn’t get nearly as far if he tried to attack the Wicked Witch. “You fucking bitch.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said as if just remembering something. “You’re his parent as well—at least, biologically. You were with him how long back in that land? Ten, twenty minutes tops?”

“Stop!” Snow shouted at the same time Charming yelled, “Leave him alone!”

The Witch laughed at them. “Oh, this is precious,” she crowed. “Such a close-knit family of misfits.” Her smile disappeared in the next moment, replaced by a cold look of contempt. “Now, that spell that knocked Henry unconscious when his memories reasserted themselves was easy, and will happen again and again and again—” Charming growled. “—unless you will submit fully to my control. Not as you have been—fully. Let me in, let me have your darkest secrets, your shames, and your weaknesses, or Henry suffers.” She looked at the room of defeated, and the smile was back. “Do we all agree?”

It was Regina who answered for all of them, choking back furious tears. “Yes.”

~*~

Jolly Roger, Portal – Present

Emma, as she had for the past day, sat curled up in a tight ball off in a dark corner of the boat, willing her stomach not to upend her lunch onto the wooden floorboards. The other half of the day’s hours had been spent getting introduced to the crew of the ship. Hook had rattled off some explanation about why half his crew were animated wood—golems, he’d said something about golems—and the other half were women who didn’t look a day over her age.

Belle, a harsh looking brunette with a jagged wavy dagger strapped to her thigh, had been the one he’d left in charge when he’d come looking for Emma. Emma had tried to catch a glimpse of what was written down the metal of the dagger, but only caught an ‘R’ and a couple ‘t’s before Belle had quickly turned away.

Tink—Tinkerbell, fucking Tinkerbell—was tiny even when human sized, her supposedly staple green traded in for leathers and more daggers and tubes of something (fairy dust was what she’d likely called it, but Emma hadn’t been paying attention). Hook then told her that Red Riding Hood (apparently she preferred Ruby now) and Mulan were off on a reconnaissance mission in some city they were headed to. Aurora, off to the side in a knee-length dress and leggings, had pouted at the mention of Mulan, but shifted into a smile when she noticed Emma staring.

The last of the crew was the youngest, a girl who couldn’t have been a day over nineteen. Her hair was braided, those braids braided again with little jewels and scraps of cloth, and she had dark brown skin that did all of nothing to hide the scars under her unnaturally gleaming white irises. A sword was strapped to her back, jagged edged and looking much too heavy for her tiny frame. With barely hidden pride, Hook had introduced her as Isis.

The boat—the Jolly Roger—had just launched itself into a huge green vortex in the ocean that had sprung from a bean (a bean!) as if this was normal, as if it was something that should exist, and expected her to go along with it. There has to be another explanation, she thought. Drugs, hallucinations, something that doesn’t include—

The ship shuddered again, nearly pitching her off her perch of barrels into a wall of crates. She groaned, gripping the barrel under her, knuckles white. This couldn’t be happening, she thought dizzily, despite the fact that it was obviously all very possible.

Emma was on Captain Hook’s ship, heading to rescue her parents, Snow White and Prince Charming. And the Wicked Witch had captured her son. With magic.

God, she needed a drink.

A knock sounded on the door of the supply room, and she looked up as light shined through the cracks of the crates briefly through the open door.

“Hello?” she heard Belle, of all people, call out. “Emma?” Emma didn’t answer, hoping the other woman would go away. She didn’t, and pulled some of the crates away to sit beside her. “How are you?”

Emma snorted. “You really need to ask?” Belle’s lips twitched into something like a smile, and her fingers toyed with the blade of her dagger. They sat in silence for a minute, before Emma continued. “Can you run this whole thing by me again? Hook told me everything, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention.”

Belle’s face darkened for a beat—not even quick enough for Emma to be sure she’d seen it—and Emma wondered for the first time how this fairytale character, known for her books and unfailing capacity for love, had ended up hardened on a pirate ship. She wondered what happened to the fairytale characters Hook claimed were her friends and family.

“Of course,” Belle said with a smile. “You remember the whole Regina-casting-the-dark-curse bit right?” Emma nodded, and she continued. “Well, you came along, and she…ended up on our side, along with a few other ‘bad guys’ and then Peter Pan—” She tried to keep the snort in, she really did, but Belle continued as if she hadn’t noticed. “—kind of reused the curse, taking advantage of the groundwork already laid so it would work in an instant. We were all sent back to the Enchanted Forest, still being torn apart by ogres, and set about trying to rebuild. The Wicked Witch came not long after, and waged war.”

“Your mom and dad, Snow and Charming, enlisted Regina’s help as a kind of general-slash-advisor along with the bit of army that was still loyal to her, but we…lost. While they fought that losing battle, Regina intercepted word that the Wicked Witch knew of your power, and was sending people for you. It was only later that we knew that it was a ploy—while she did want to snuff out your possible aid, she needed the leverage over Regina, who wasn’t going down easily.”

In the pause, Emma asked, “And how did you all end up on a ship to find me? Aren’t all the princesses supposed to be with their princes protecting their happily ever afters?”

Belle laughed, a single harsh bark. “None of us have our loves, in some form. Hook lost his a long time ago, N-Baelfire—he was on the ship before he was captured by the Witch’s men on a recon mission—l-lost his dad, and Tink and Isis are just not with anyone, Ruby ate her lover" Emma's eyebrows shot up at that, but it seemed to be old news to the brunette, so she held her tongue, "and Philip, Aurora’s former fiancée, died two months after we got back in an ogre attack.”

Emma waited, but when nothing else came she pressed, “And your…?” She didn’t know how to kindly ask what had happened to the other half of Beauty and the Beast

“Dead.”

The word was the blade of a guillotine, lopping off the remainder of the conversation for the rest of the time Belle sat with her.

~*~

Castle of Queen Regina, Tiporo – Ten and a Half Months Previous

The knock startled Regina from what she was doing, and the vase crashed to the floor of the room, shard of glass flying everywhere over the alternating veins of stone and earth. The garden itself wrapped around the side of the castle, where the wide walkways once were, and the moonlight bounced off the shards of the vase now in pieces at Regina’s feet. It was a small thing, in light of the fact that her grandfather’s old castle (before Tiporo’s collapse when she was little, before the war (the slaughter), before so much destruction—) was still being renovated to Regina’s liking, but still. Reagan blinked at the mess, before looking up at Regina’s arched eyebrow.

He grinned sheepishly at her look, looking for all the world like a boy in trouble with his parents, despite the fact that as a part of shedding the identity of ‘Lost Boy’ he had taken a new name accepted command of Regina’s guard (and he couldn’t possibly need Regina as a mother, Regina, the Evil Queen, destroyer of happy endings—)

“Sorry, Madame, but this came for you,” he held up a thick envelop, which had magic pulsing under its translucent papers no doubt holding it closed, with the distinct red seal of Lowerhund—a summons. “The man said it was urgent.”

~*~

Castle of Queen Snow and King Charming, Famigier – Ten and a Half Months Previous

Regina burst into the war room of Snow and Charming’s castle not an hour later, dark cloak billowing around her battle armor, all gleaming metal and thick leathers. Her hair was pulled back with the distinct red feathers woven through them (and she should be worried, because she’d only ever felt the need to put Tiporo Heron feathers in before a battle, and they’d just gotten back, and she’d put them in without a thought—).

“What happened?” she demanded of the shocked occupants of the table. She scoffed. “Oh, don’t give me that look. Just because it took a viewer sensitive letter a day to get to me doesn’t mean I would take the same amount of time. Now, the only reason you would be so insulting as to summon me was if someone was threatening Henry in the Magicless World, so I ask again—” She leaned over the table and eyed each of them, her arms directly beside Snow White’s head. “—what happened!”

“Not Henry,” David, King, now, started to say, and Regina snarled.

“It has to do with all of us,” Abigail intervened quickly, here in the stead of her dying father. “The kingdoms—all of them—are about to be under attack.”

~*~

Jolly Roger, Shang Harbor, Tuoba, The Enchanted Forest – Present

“Land, ho!” Isis’s cry from above finally roused them, Belle extending a hand to help Emma off of her seat. The deck was a hive of activity when they got up, golems and girls alike running around doing who-knew-what as they prepared to land.

Ahead of them, just after the sea, stretched a wall of thick and steep black mountains, rivers and waterfalls dotting and weaving and falling through each as boats much smaller than the Jolly Roger wove in and out of the craggy rock, going to and from a bustling harbor that somehow managed to look cheery even with the thick fog hovering over the harbor’s town.

A figure detached itself from the crowd and stood waiting for them. As soon as they were docked in range, Aurora threw herself over the side of the boat, slinking down the side with handhelds Emma had never seen, and threw herself at the figure.

“Mulan!” she exclaimed, then kissed her, and Emma decided to write Disney a strongly worded letter about accuracy and censorship when she got back. The rest of the crew followed at a more sedate pace, clambering off down the ladder someone had the good sense to set up.

Emma was the last to disembark, and barely had time to appreciate solid land before she heard Belle shout, “Ruby, no!” and a wall of red and brown hair and yet more leather collided with her side, and down they both went.

“Emma!” the wall exclaimed, and Emma saw that it was a woman that couldn’t way more than about two-thirds her weight and felt like she was mostly bone and cheekbones and perky breasts. “Welcome back, princess!”

Emma blinked up at the flushed, excited face, and decided to push back dealing with this latest shock of the day. “Ruby, right?” she asked, pointing to the streaks of red through the other woman’s hair.

“Yup!” Ruby nodded, grinning. “You remember?”

“No, sorry,” she shrugged, actually sorry she couldn’t remember the enthusiastic younger woman. Surprisingly, the grin on Ruby’s face only dimmed somewhat, and she clambered to her feet to help Emma up. Belle strode up behind her, and Emma blurted out without thinking, “Are you two a thing, too?”

“No, of course not,” Belle brushed off the question like it wasn’t even worth considering. Ruby, Emma couldn’t help but see, deflated considerably at the answer.

“Nah, only single lesbians on this ship,” Ruby valiantly tried for her earlier grin, and somehow pulled it off.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Tink said from behind Emma, coming around and bumping her hip against Ruby’s. “There’s a bar just up the road right beside an all-girls inn-thing, if what Mulan says is true, and I plan to—”

“Help the local Foxes load up for our rescue mission?” Isis cut Tink off, strutting up and inserting herself into the group as if she was much older than she was. “Hook is with Ming planning on how best to go about this whole rescue mission. Ruby, Mulan, he says he needs you. Belle and Aurora, you can help Tink. Swan, you’re with me.” Emma jumped at her name, but hurried after her when she saw Isis already walking off.

~*~

Isis had been leading Emma around and up the mountains for over an hour before she stopped and turned suddenly, and Emma nearly ran head first into her.

“We need to go slow now, or we’ll be caught by Ming or Ruby,” Isis muttered.

“Caught?” Emma demanded. “Why the fuck are we—”

A wolf howled somewhere over a jagged wall of rock, and Isis hissed, “Shh!” then silently bounded over to kneel behind a slightly lower wall of rock.

“Why the fuck are we sneaking around?” Emma hissed, going to her knees behind the girl.

“Because Hook thinks you an invalid because you lost your memory, and that you don’t need to hear this,” Isis replied. “In my experience, that just causes a lot of pain when the person does find out, and trying what he’s trying to pull just might get us all killed. Look.”

Emma looked. Way down below them laid a valley of sand, the sand being pushed around on the wind, and the entire far side surrounded by thick fog. In the middle stood three women, tall in plain white clothes and with their dark hair piled on top of their head. Power, impossible to describe how or it’s feeling, poured off all three, the middle at least three times as much as her lackeys. Across from them, in between Ruby and Mulan, stood Hook.

“Are you the Ming that Mulan has been talking my ear off about?” Hook called out, crossing his arms with his usual arrogance.

“I am,” the middle one said. She motioned to her left then right, pointing out her two guards: one just a touch shorter than the rest, with soft curves that no doubt hid a deadly muscle; and a feral looking woman, a streak of grey going through her hair and winding its way through the pile on her head. “And this is Li—” The feral one. “—and Fen.” The short one. “Hook? And are you the werewolf?” She spoke to Ruby.

“Yes, she is,” Hook cut across whatever Ming was going to say, and her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “And since you know that, I assume you know why we’re here so we can skip the pleasantries.”

“Yes,” she purred, and her eyes glided over the peaks surrounding the group, and Emma would have sworn they stayed a bit too long where she and Isis were hidden. Isis muttered a curse.

“So will you help?” Hook demanded when she didn’t say anything further.

“Death,” Ming said slowly. “Affects us all. It will come whether we fight it, or roll over like dogs.” She glanced at Ruby when she said this, and Ruby visibly bristled but stayed silent in her place.

“But as you are well aware,” Mulan spoke up for the first time, bowing, “The consumer of all realms does not usually come with it.”

‘Consumer of all Realms?’ Emma mouthed to Isis, incredulous.

Isis nodded, and motioned for her to shut up and pay attention.

Ming had the look of a lioness with a mouse that had willingly crawled between her teeth. “But I hear you have gotten a…solution with you. You could not possibly need the help of lowly fox spirits, now, could you?”

“We’re not…strong enough to get through her wards temporarily,” Ruby muttered, bowing reluctantly in a display of submission that fooled no one there. “You are, in your other form.”

“And what would our task be? Retrieval of prisoners? Their…bodies?” Ming asked curiously, victorious glee apparent on her face.

Mulan’s head snapped up at her tone, looking wildly around before her eyes landed squarely on Isis and Emma’s hiding place. She whipped back around to do something to shut Hook up, but he’d already dug their grave when she was looking. “Any prisoners would take a back seat to defeating the Wicked Witch,” Hook said blithely, and the ground dropped out from below Emma. “We don’t care about them or their bodies if it gets in the way of that.”

“You son of a bitch!” Emma shouted, jumping up as her voice echoed through the mountain. “You lying son of a bitch!”

Hook and Ruby gaped while Mulan hung her head, and Ming and her cohorts grinned with unabashed glee. She ran.

~*~

Castle of Queen Regina, Tiporo – Five Months Previous

The grounds were pretty in the moonlight. The newly restored pieces gleamed in it, and the shadows they cast were long enough to hide the imperfections that persisted in the restoration. Regina’s hands tightened on the railing of the balcony, and she leaned over slightly.

“You’re going to break their hearts, Your Majesty,” Regina heard from behind her. She jumped, but didn’t turn around. She recognized the voice, and no one else would dare enter into her bedchambers without knocking.

“Not technically my title anymore, Ackerman,” she sighed. “And that hardly matters.”

“You can’t lie to me, Your Majesty,” Anselm Ackerman said, continuing with the honorific just to irk her (to tease her, like the big brother she never had, playful as he always had been since she’d been nothing more than—) “I’ve been with you from the very beginning.”

“I did have a good run of it when I was disguised as a peasant,” she reminded him, as he stepped up beside her.

“Ah, but I wasn’t there, wasn’t even assigned to that route for a month.”

“You were a stowaway in a cart to protect your little brother on his first assignment.” She turned to him finally, giving him a stare that couldn’t have been taken seriously with her in a nightgown that went down to her ankles and having her hair falling down her back. “You were also the one to ignore my order and save an entire village.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I do believe I was already punished for that; a lenient punishment for what amounts for treason, to be sure—”

“I’ve never said thank you,” she interrupted him. “In my rage at missing my archenemy, I condemned an entire village to death without thinking. The night I got back, I had nightmares about ordering genocide for sheer pettiness. Your morals, your bravery, showed me what I would have been on the road to becoming, and pulled me back from a very hard edge.”

Anselm grinned in relief. “We were lucky they’d just had a border skirmish. There wouldn’t have been enough freshly dead unburied bodies otherwise.”

She laughed, because maybe her humor had gotten darker, but they were at war, so who cared? “I would have paid money to see King George’s face if he knew that his men were being used to teach the Consort-Turned-Queen a lesson in morality!” They laughed harder.

“And he writes a long whiny letter to King Midas,” Ackerman stuttered out through gasps of air. “Oh, Midas, can you believe the nerve? Lowerhund has truly gone to the dogs!” Their laughter reached a hysterical pitch, and tears were streaming down Regina’s face. Every time they tried to stop, they’d look at each other’s laugh-ruddy faces and collapse again. Bursts of laughter rang out for almost a half hour until they finally managed to calm down, leaning against the railing of the balcony in a comfortable silence.

Regina finally sighed, looking over at Anselm. He was old for a guard, from the northern reaches of Lowerhund before Queen Eva even died (was killed, to put Regina on the throne), with grey streaks obvious in hair slicked back from a wrinkled pale face. He was kind and loyal to her, even when the title Queen was a privilege, when she’d been barely more than the King’s (New! Young! Exotic!) Plaything. He, as he’d said before, had been with her (truly, more loyal than most of her other guards) from the very beginning.

“That was the only time you disobeyed me,” she whispered. “Even when you disagreed with me after that, begged me to reconsider, you chose your loyalty to me over your morals.”

“To be fair, you never asked me to go against my morals so grievously again,” he told her.

“Now I have to,” she sat up fully, and he frowned. “Anselm Ackerman, I’m ordering you, once I’m gone, to get the boys here as far away from the danger zone as possible. Keep them out of the Wicked Witch’s control, whatever you do. You know the ones that will try to come help me once they see how much this hurts. Don’t let them. If I see any of you back here before the Wicked Witch is dead or I send for you, the price is on your head.”

He gaped at her in outrage, before schooling his features. “I take it from this order you won’t be able to keep this contained for long?” he asked.

“Not even a month,” she told him, tears running down the tracks already made on her face. “To do this, I need to know they’re safe, at least a little while longer.”

He took a deep breath. “Alright,” he grunted. “Alright, I’ll do it.”

~*~

“Madame, you can’t!” Lee shouted, scrambling into Regina’s lap. He was a gangly teenager, but a boy still (her boy, like the brother Henry never had, her little boy). She’d gathered him, as well as the remaining Lost Boys and her two highest ranking guards, into the garden, and all wore matching looks of horror at what she was suggesting. The implied care they all held for her safety (for her) touched something in her heart she forgot existed (that hadn’t existed, not since Daniel, since Henry, since Emma—).

“I have to agree with Lee, Madame,” Reagan said. “This is just stupid!”

A chorus of ‘yeahs!’ and then someone else spoke up.

“Can’t you set up wards for our realm from here?” the newest recruit of her guard asked (a whine really, but considering what she was going to do—), a young boy by the name of Faustino, his thick, wild black hair neatly plaited for once. He’d been picked when her previous guard was still with her, and had risen quickly through army ranks to be able to join, and was just now made Reagan’s Second (She should probably be more worried that boys she’d grown to care about (like Henry, so much (too much) like Henry, it hurt—) were fighting for her, but she was bursting with too much pride for that).

“Not wards this strong,” she told them reluctantly. “It’s taking everything I have to keep the ward’s we’ve already set up going from here. I need to be closer to where the Wicked Witch herself is trying to come through. Her soldiers are low-level enough that they can come in anywhere, but she is powerful enough that without a portal it will take a rift the likes of which this land had never seen for her to get through. I need to be there to do damage control immediately if we have any hope of winning. I will have to go north to—”

“There,” Reagan practically snarled. Of all of the boys, he was the only one that knew the full story, and that was only because of one night her magic had been particularly depleted by the war efforts and he’d heard her screaming in her sleep.

“To the Lowerhund Royal Castle, yes,” she said, and nearly shuddered at the memory—she’d only stayed there originally because people already didn’t trust her, and what would it look like, the young bride moving the royal grounds before Leopold’s body was even cold?

His eyes darkened further, and she sighed. “It’s the closest to where she’s trying to break through,” she tried to reason. “Once I’m closer the wards will be much stronger, stronger than she could possibly be. I’ll be fine.”

~*~

Shang Harbor, Tuoba, the Enchanted Forest – Present

“They’re out looking for you, you know,” a voice murmured behind her, and Emma jumped almost a foot in the air.

“Son of a—” She glared at Aurora, refusing to smile at any of the insane crew that had dragged her out here on a ship of lies. “I don’t want to talk to you.” The bar stool she was sitting on wiggled unstably, and the loud talk and music continued on around them, oblivious.

“The crew of the Jolly Roger or me specifically?” When Emma didn’t answer, she continued, “I’m here as me.”

“Aren’t they the same,” Emma demanded. “With you all being close enough to lie to my face?”

“Believe or not I was one of the votes against lying to you about this,” she told her.

Emma snorted. “Of course there was a vote. When the fuck do you even have time to vote?”

“When you were hiding in the food stores like a child,” and Emma had to give her points for that one. “None of us wanted to hurt you, but you’re our last hope.”

“Last hope for what? And don’t leave a goddamn thing out this time,” Emma warned her.

The younger girl still looked hesitant. “Hook had a plan, to work you up to this in time for—”

“I think we’ve established that Hook’s plans don’t always work,” Emma cut her off, and Aurora finally caved.

“You, as Snow White and Prince Charming’s child, are the product of true love,” she began. “Combine that with Rumpelstiltskin, the Blue Fairy, Regina—all these powerful magical beings working in such a vicinity on the Dark Curse…the best we can figure out is that it attracted more darkness. The Wicked Witch, as she’s come to be called. She’d from a different realm, Oz, we think, only because all other realms we could reach had never heard of her, and when we tried to reach Oz…” She looked up, tears in her eyes.

“Oz was gone. Like this realm had never existed. Darkness—pure darkness, not dark souls, or monsters, or dark magic—was all that remained. She has a weapon, something we’ve never seen, and it consumes entire realms. We had to involve you, even before she targeted Henry, because she wasn’t going to stop at this realm, and the Land Without Magic, taking out the factor of preset portals.”

“But I don’t remember anything,” Emma’s brows furrowed, anger pressed back from boiling, for now.

“You’re not supposed to,” Aurora told her. “You remember, that for the last six months, you and Henry have been taking the exact same route everywhere? And any time you decided to go away from that route, something distracted you?”

“You magicked the entire city,” Emma breathed, unsure whether to be mad or impressed.

“Not me,” Aurora told her. “But yes.”

“And after, with Henry?” she asked.

“How much did Hook tell you about the Evil Queen?” the other woman asked, tilting her head.

Emma opened her mouth to respond, then anger hit again, and she swore loudly. “Not a damn thing!” she growled. “Other than to say she exists and is somehow helping.”

“Which likely isn’t Hook’s fault,” Aurora tried to placate her. “The curse is still affecting you, and likely Henry, though we don’t know that for certain.”

“And why would my son be a pawn against her?” She pressed herself to listen, to remember this time, and she felt something in her head give way.

“She…” Aurora looked around. “She was his mother.”

Emma’s gut reaction was to laugh at the absurdity, to mock (because that couldn’t be true, why would the Evil Queen want a baby, and why the hell would she let her have Henry (and why did that line of questioning feel so wrong, because Evil Queen was somehow now tangled in her head with bedtime, and indulged comics, and ice-cream after school—)), but something stilled her tongue.

“I was banging the Snow White’s Evil Queen?” Emma asked instead, because that was somehow easier.

“No,” Aurora shook her head (and that shouldn’t feel disappointing, shouldn’t feel like an outright lie—). “It was just complicated, and would take more than the time we have left in the day to explain.” Had it really been only a day?

She snorted, and they stayed silent for a while, before Emma spoke up again. “Why are you here?” she asked. “Like, why are you on the Jolly Roger, searching for some high-school dropout that turned out to be fairytale royalty?”

“Philip,” Aurora said simply, and Emma’s head snapped up. “Not in the way you think—I love Mulan, though it took getting married to Philip to see that.”

“That makes…no sense,” Emma tried and failed to come up with a conceivable way for this to work out like it had.

“Everyone else has a connection to you are to someone who loves you,” Aurora told her. “I am here, because the Wicked Witch kidnapped all the royalty when she took over, with them as her playthings until whatever’s keeping her weapon at bay dissolves, and Philip is there.”

“Still not getting it to be honest.” Emma peered into her drink, and wondered if someone had drugged her.

“Philip loves me, and I love him, but neither of us feel anything remotely resembling attraction for each other,” she grinned wryly. “Before the Curse, we agreed to play at love to fool everyone, because there were no other royalty who simply wasn’t attracted to the proper sex. Mulan told me later that she’d wrung it out of him while they were looking for me, his worry over True Love’s Kiss not working on me, though she couldn’t place why. We were lucky—friendship was enough for it to work, though everyone only talked about these epic romances.”

Emma nodded along. “And how do you end up getting married to him, if Mulan was there?”

“We’d never met before, and I had no idea Mulan loved me so. When I told her I got engaged to Philip, she said nothing, but acted happy for me and told me she was joining the Merry Men!” Aurora’s glass was shaking in her handed, and her eyes shined with tears. “I was, again, so lucky to find her right before she left, sobbing over a piece of cloth from one of the dresses I tore on the adventure I had with you and Snow White.”

“And the rest is history?” Emma grinned, in spite of herself, deciding not to ask when in the fuck she went on an adventure with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.

“Not all,” Aurora said smugly, and pulled down her shirt to pull out a ring on a necklace. “We’re engaged, and the wedding is happening as soon as this wretched war is over.”

“Congratulations,” Emma told her sincerely, and knocked back the rest of her drink.

“Yeah,” Aurora muttered, then seemed to startle, glancing around. “Oh, it’s late!” She turned back to Emma. “I meant to ask you to come back to the boat with me, but we’d have to run to get there before the others coming in from searching for you.”

Emma lifted an eyebrow. “You’re really not going to make me talk to Hook?”

“You have my word,” Aurora smiled. They made it back in record time.

Emma had managed to fall into a fitful sleep in the bunk Aurora had set up for her when she was awoken by shouting. Slowly, she got up and crept to the door, listening carefully.

~*~

Former Castle of King Leopold and Queen Regina, Lowerhund – Present

The Wicked Witch tore through the shelves of the libraries frantically, tearing through the stifling silence of the destroyed palace. Book after book flew over her shoulder as what she was looking for continuously eluded her. There had to be something, anything on—

“My liege.”

“What!” she screeched, hurling the book in her hand at the servant who would dare interrupt her. It cowered in the shadows, blinking up at her uncertainly. “What,” she bit out at a more reasonable decibel.

“Y-You wished to know when the royal prisoners had been moved,” it stuttered out, and she growled. The very objects of her frustrations had arrived. When she’d come to this realm, she’d been stupefied by how hard it had been to push their forces back—especially those of the evil queen. She’d managed finally, but still, there were…problems.

“I-If I may,” it stuttered out, limping closer once he knew that he wouldn’t be struck down. “Master will be here in a matter of weeks—days, possibly…w-wouldn’t it be more bett—prudent to focus on the threat.”

“What do you think I’m doing?” she snapped. “The Bonded have been a threat in every world, but I’ve always managed to break them. These, this Snow and Charming, have yet to even come close, in spite of their submission. And now there’s the threat of the True Love of the Queen, the most powerful magical being in the realm?”

“True Love?”

“What they call the Bonded in this realm,” she muttered, leafing through another book. “She doesn’t even know how she herself feels about the woman, despite their…time together.” And hadn’t that been a fun torture session, finding out the Queen had fucked her own step-granddaughter, and threatening to use that to ruin the fragile good will between her and Snow. “It would be an advantage, her ignorance, if I couldn’t see the Bonds between people.” The book was as useless as all the rest and she casually hurled it at her servant and picked up another. Where, where, where—

A screech, and then her right hand came crashing through the glass of the library’s roof in a ball of fur and feathers. He hopped to his feet, hoisting his upper body up on his front paws and stretching his wings. His speech was a howl only she could understand. “My liege!” he yelled frantically. “She’s here! The Queen’s Bonded is here!”

She spun around to face him, the pages of the book in her hand flying through their sequence. “Where?” she growled. She’d barely managed to defeat the Queen, and the two of them on the same side and allowed full range of power, as they would be in this, would ruin her.

“Shang, in Tuoba,” he panted. “The refugees on the Islands are mobilizing, and her presence convinced the Wen spirits to join them.”

She shrieked, and was about to shut the book and hurl it at him, favoritism be damned, but then a drawing caught her eye. A diagram heart, sketched to be glowing, with the different parts labeled and at the bottom of the page…yes.

“The human heart is the organ most vulnerable to Extraction Dark Magic. It is usually protected by the body’s natural magic barriers. The barriers themselves are low-level, but strong against natural magic. Dark Magic, which in and of itself unnatural, is able to get around this, but is a skill known to only few in the realm. Despite its obscurity, Extraction—heart-taking—is inherently easy, and can be accomplished by most in all realms.”

She smiled. “Good,” she told him. “Send her a…Wicked Welcome.”


	2. Plotting and Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Its a metaphor, you see. You promise yourself you're going to update a week later, and don't actually update for a good three months, and don't even have the full chapter...I have no excuse.

PART TWO (-PART-ONE) – Plotting and Memories

Jolly Roger, Tuoba Coastal Waters – Present

The shouting had gone on for hours, late into the night even after they left Shang. By this point, Emma had walked to one corner of the room to rummage for food and come back three times, and they were still going at it. She chewed on the questionable bread, and continued listening, bits of sentences jumping out of the completely muddled mess.

“—regardless, is completely out of line, Navigator, I am the bloody effing captain of the ship—!”

“—shove it up your ass, Hook, Ming only agreed because of what I did, and you almost got us all—”

“Don’t even try it, Isis, like you wouldn’t throw a goddamn feast if there was a chance the war could go south and get Queen Regina killed in a—”

“Shut up, Ruby! I may not agree with what Hook did—”

“Really, Belle? With Gold dead and Baelfire captured you would agree to jump off a cliff if he said, since he’s all that’s left of your precious psychopath!”

The crack of skin on skin echoed in the resulting silence. Emma scrambled away from the door when she heard the scuffle of boots coming towards her door. She sat in her nest of boxes as Ruby burst through the door, one cheek red. Tink came in behind her, followed by Aurora and Isis. Belle seemed to waver, but Ruby slammed the door closed before she could decide, cutting off Emma’s view of her.

She stomped over to some crates off in the corner that Emma had been taking food from, roughly ripping things from it until she came up with a tightly wrapped pack. The others watched cautiously as she ripped at the binding, muttering under her breathe the whole time.

Aurora and Isis tiptoed over to where Emma was, Isis sitting down beside Emma while Aurora hovered behind her hopping from foot to foot.  “We wanted to apologize,” Aurora said abruptly, “formally, for lying to you.”

“And for possibly putting you in danger like that,” Isis broke in gruffly, bumping her shoulder with her own. Aurora kicked her in the hip. “Ok, for definitely putting you in danger like that. It was wrong of me, despite the fact that Ming’s decision not to rip Hook’s head off for his arrogance came from that exact decision—ow!”

“Just you two?” Emma asked, eyeing Ruby and Tink.

Tink looked up from where she was hovering around Ruby. “Mulan is trying to keep Belle and Hook from killing each other,” Tink said. Ruby started growling, a low rumbling sound that reverberated across the entire room.

“Belle says she didn’t know that Hook would lie about rescuing your son being part of this whole thing, and—would you stop!” She rounded on Ruby. “You and Belle have had a stick shoved up both your asses the entire time we’ve been on this boat, and you have decided to take everything personally just because Bell refused to sleep with you while she is in mourning!”

Ruby was almost purple in her rage. “Don’t you dare—”

Tink cut her off again. “No, Ruby!” she shouted. “We all put up with this when it was just between you and Belle. Quite frankly, I was rooting for you two to get together! But now it’s threatening to get in the way of our mission, which is to defeat the Wicked Witch, and save Emma’s son. Belle was in love with him, and he died protecting her. Whatever his faults, however messed up their initial story was, he loved her enough to die protecting her, and you can’t force her to get over that on your terms!”

She stepped closer to Ruby, though Emma hadn’t thought they could get any closer. “Please, for us, for the son of one of your closest friends, don’t keep doing this to yourself,” she whispered. “We need you all in.” Finally, Ruby nodded, shame warring with the remaining rage on her face.

“That closest friend is still waiting for an apology,” Isis cut in crassly, making Emma jump.

“Uh…I don’t need—” Emma tried to say, floundering after Tink’s speech.

“Emma, I’m sorry,” Ruby told her, a sardonic grin fighting its way onto her face. “Like they all said, we’re here to get your son back, and defeat the Wicked Witch while we’re at it. Tink’s right.” She bumped her hip against the smaller woman, making the fairy flinch in surprise. “I should be focusing on that.”

“Thanks,” Emma responded, shifting awkwardly. “It’s, uh, much appreciated.” Silence, then: “So, what’s the actual plan for killing the Wicked Witch?”

“Water,” Mulan said as she walked through the door.

“Water?” Emma protested. “You’re kidding me, water?”

“It’s the one possible weakness she has,” Aurora defended Mulan (of course she did). Mulan walked over to stand by her, wrapping one arm around her waist. “Before she put up protection around her body against it, we were close to killing her with just that.”

“Ming is necessary, because she and her merry band are the only ones who can slip through wards undetected,” Ruby cut in, “and they surround the castle. Regina can lift the Wicked Witch’s control on everyone for a couple minutes, as she did before, but there was no purpose before.”

“And with me, there is?”

“If Belle pulls her head out of her ass long enough,” Ruby mutters.

“With the Wicked Witch’s control lifted, Regina has enough power to bring down her inner wards. All she needs is someone on the outside bringing down the outer wards. Belle can’t; she’s not powerful enough, and she hasn’t worked with Regina before. Whether you remember or not, you have, and Belle can teach you what you need to know. She was supposed to have requested to teach you already,” Tink finished explaining, and Emma gaped at her, her heart doing its damnedest to collapse in on itself. “While we’re fighting her army, ideally, you and Regina would be taking down the Witch’s Wards.”

“And you couldn’t have told me earlier?” Emma demanded.

“Of course not!” Tink looked offended at the very suggestion. “We shouldn’t have told you at all before Belle could request it!”

“It’s custom,” Ruby defended her gruffly when it was clear that Tink wasn’t saying anything more (despite the fact that Emma looked two seconds away from ripping her head off).  “With magic—here at least, unless…” She growled, tugging her hair.

“It’s a show of trust.”

Everyone jumped, turning to look at the stiff silhouette of Belle, outlined by the dim light of a nearly full moon. Ruby’s scowl deepened, and she pushed past her without a word. Tink took a step to follow her, but hung back.

“It’s tradition in most parts of the Enchanted Forest,” Belle continued, and the others silently trickled out as she stepped closer to Emma. “Magic is present, people talk about it and use magical objects, but the actual teaching of magic is dangerous—it makes people dangerous in the worst ways. If someone isn’t born with it, they have to know this—be told this—by their possible mentor, and the mentor has to submit to all questions about magic and themselves. It puts the student in control, and even after the questioning, they can say they don’t want to learn.”

She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “Usually.”

“And I went through all this the first time around?” Emma questioned.

“Oh, no,” Belle shook her head at the apparently absurd idea. “You were born of a couple of True Love, so you have magic in you whether you use it or not. With a romantic and deep love like that, plus the magic performed in relation and around both of them, it’s the most obvious sign. Snow had magic performed on her in a curse, Charming became a part of that when he broke it. Magic plus love makes more magic.” She shrugged, like it was a simple childish lesson like ‘look both ways’ or ‘don’t talk to strangers.’

“You,” she pointed at Emma, “Should have been getting magic training lessons from the time you were old enough to talk, possibly before then. Queen Regina was training you a little before the curse was recast, but still.”

“And you expect me to relearn all of—whatever by the time you hustle me up to face someone who took whole kingdoms?” Emma knew she was starting to panic, but could find it in herself to give a damn. “Who destroyed Oz? I was in a mostly magic-less Ney York not forty-eight hours ago!

Belle frowned. “Yes, well—”

“My son’s life relies on me killing the Wicked Witch of the West!” Emma shouted right over her. “This is impossible, what you want me to do! At best, we die quickly, at worst—” She sucked in a shuddering gasp, and she heard glass shatter. Both women jumped, looking over to the corner where a glass jar had exploded, leaving shards embedded in sticky preserved peach jam on the walls.

Belle looked from the mess to Emma and back with increasing interest. “That shouldn’t have happened,” she breathed.

Sledgehammers were trying to pound Emma’s eyeballs out. “Yeah, well I don’t—ah!” she cried out as the pounding flared, then dissipated, leaving pictures on her eyelids that were quickly fading.

“You remember something.” Belle was suddenly closer than she had any right to be. “What do you remember?”

“A-A sign? Storybrooke,” Emma stuttered out, grasping at the fading images that were quickly leaving in lieu of another pulse of the headache. “A schoolteacher and something about an amnesiac…a dragon…wolves?…hearts, not even in their bodies, just so many hearts…”

“That’s not possible,” the other woman breathed, then frowned. “Or maybe it is; all things done by a curse break down if not broken immediately, though some much later than others. This falls under the doings of a curse, doesn’t it? Or maybe it has something to do with being of True Love, or—”

“Shut. Up.” Emma glared at her. “Unless you want to help with this god awful headache.”

She was not expecting the rushed, “I may be able to help with that.”

~*~

Castle of King Eric and Queen Ariel, The Islands – Ten Months Previous

The sun had barely risen before the King and Queen were summoned to their own war room. Queen Regina was already waiting for them, standing in the middle of the room with a guard of three men surrounding her. It couldn’t have been for more than show, but the guards made up a terrifying show. Eric held out his hand, but Regina skipped greetings altogether.

“You need to evacuate your people,” she told them as they sat.

Eric and Ariel looked between them, shocked. “Wha—why?” they both stuttered out.

“Is this about those rogue flying monkeys that have been attacking in your north?” Ariel continued.

“They’re a bit more than that, dear,” Regina gave her a tight smile. “But, essentially, yes. They’re strong—a lot stronger than first appear, moth magically and physically. We also have no idea why they’re coming.”

“Still?” Erica cut in. Regina glared at him, leaning forward menacingly, and he fell back behind Ariel as much as his seat would allow.

“Something has to be driving them,” Ariel insisted. “Where are they attacking?”

“Anywhere,” Regina bit out. “In the north, and anywhere there’s excessive water by the portals they come through. Those portals are spreading out, and the further they are from the north, the more—damaged the monkeys come out. Like wounded animals, but that just makes them stronger.” She straightened. “And that leads perfectly to why you need to get your people off and away from these islands.”

“I don’t control any mermaids, my father does.” Ariel bit her lip. “And even then, not all of them. Maybe half.”

“I don’t care,” Regina told her. “Get as many out as possible.”

“Won’t you need someone here, though?” Eric asked. “To tell you when and where portals open up?”

“I’ll figure it out later. It would have to be someone very specialized: a trained soldier, someone who could get a message to me quickly, someone who could work equally well in both water and on land—”

“Like me.” Ariel held up her wrist, and the thick cuff still on it.

“No!” Eric immediately protested.

“You don’t fit two of those three requirements,” Regina said bluntly.

“You could enchant one of our mirrors to fit into the system you’re setting up on the mainland. And I can learn to fight.”

One of the guards, an old man, spoke for the first time. “You wouldn’t need to fight; you would need to take orders. Can someone born into leadership truly handle that?”

“I can learn,” Ariel repeated, ignoring her husband’s continued protests.

Regina gave her a long, unreadable stare, before finally nodding. “You’ll need a new trinket; I’ll be back in three days.”

With that, she disappeared in a cloud of purple smoke.

~*~

The deep hum of magic reverberated through the courtyard, swirling around the two women and keeping the observers on the periphery. Incandescent mist hung low over the grass, blurring the figures in the center to two dark crouched figures.

“Is…i-is magic always like this?” Eric leaned over to whisper to one of the guards, flanking him like menacing shadows.

“I wouldn’t know,” the guard whispered back. “I’m new. Faustino.” He held out his hand. Eric shook it.

“You’re new and on the Queen’s Guard?”

“New-ish,” Faustino corrected himself. “I was around about a month before the curse struck, and was…detained when the curse broke with the other guards, so that’s why you didn’t see me around.”

“Detained?” Eric questioned when the younger man didn’t continue.

“Detained,” and his voice brooked no argument. The silence continued, the King and the guards watching the women in the middle of the courtyard.

The lump that Eric thought was Ariel suddenly arched her back, letting out an eerie wail as the magic ramped up, rattling the teeth in their skulls. The other two guards stopped Eric from launching himself into the fog, on him before he’d even consciously realized who was screaming.

“She agreed to this,” the younger of the two reminded him. Reagan, Eric thought he’d said his name was. ‘This’ was the idea of the bracelet being embedded into her very bone, impossible for anyone to get out, even Ariel herself—and as a result of being inside her, it was easily made into a direct conduit to the Queen. It would also allow the Queen direct access to her heart and mind, but after a discussion Ariel had forcefully pushed Eric out of, they’d agreed this was the best option.

The others straightened to attention, and Eric looked back at the center of the courtyard, where the women were standing and walking towards them, the Queen supporting most of Ariel’s weight.

“Alright?” Eric asked her worriedly.

Ariel nodded, grinning like a loon. “Magic is great,” she told him dreamily, eyes unfocused.

Eric shot the Queen a look, and she said, “I dulled the pain a bit, and it worked a bit like the other world’s morphine—taking the pain, but making the person a bit…unstable. Healing magic was never a focus of mine.”

“And this won’t hurt her?” Eric demanded, taking Ariel’s weight for her. Ariel’s wrist swung out, and he saw the new bracelet. It was thin gold bands looping lazily around her arm from her wrist to her elbow, looking more like a tattoo than a shapeshifter’s bracelet.

The Queen scoffed. “Of course not.” At his skeptical look, she continued, “I may have held the moniker ‘Evil Queen’ and the manifestations of all the pain I caused with relish, but now…”

“You’ve changed,” Eric finished for her. “We’ve heard.”

The Queen looked at him a minute longer, before turning to her guard. “Let’s go.”

~*~

Jolly Roger, Poseidon’s Sea – Present

The main deck was a bustle of activity, reminiscent of the first time Emma saw it. The crew moved with a harmony that gave away none of the heated fighting that had gone on last night, Hook at the wheel barking orders. Belle, smug with what she’d accomplished, sauntered up to him and leaned against the wheel.

“Looking to knock us off course?” Hook asked testily, jerking the wheel against Belle’s weight.

“Just thought you’d like to know that Emma has her memories back,” Belle said smugly.

The wheel jerked even more, and Hook swore, pulling the wheel frantically back into place.

“Not all of them,” Emma quickly interjected. Images still flashed sporadically across her mind’s eye, some only adding to her confusion and directly contradicting what she knew (dragons, God damn it, why were there dragons in her memory? (why didn’t the new set include Henry?)) “Just enough to get whatever magic you need to teach me quicker, and the memories still feel…like someone else’s.”

“But she has them,” Belle excitedly interjected, giddy like a child and a far cry from the mourning fighter of yesterday. If nothing else, Emma was glad her new memories gave her something else to focus on besides her loss. “She has them, Hook, and we can teach her what she needs to know, and we actually have a chance!”

Hook rolled his eyes indulgently, before a cry distracted him. He looked up in its direction at Isis, balancing on the very tops of the sails with a telescope.

“What do you see, lass?” he called out.

“Uh…,” Isis stalled. “You know of any huge schools of fish that go for big boats like ours?”

“What? Give me that.” He motioned for the telescope, and she tossed it down to him. He expertly twirled it in his fingers to point at the churning sea, and swore again at what he saw. “Those are mermaids, lass. Neverland-types it looks like, vicious bast—Ariel?!” He tossed away the telescope, it spinning end over end to pitch large end first as he rushed back to grab ahold of the steering wheel. “Ruby, Mulan, Isis! Get down here now!”

Isis nimbly fell down through the sails to land on one side of Hook, and Ruby and Mulan appeared like smoke on his other side. “Get your weapons,” he told them breathlessly. “Ruby, you might need to transform to get at them.” He turned back to the wheel, yanking it recklessly off course. “Isis, get below decks, to the very bottom, look for the weak points and stay on them! Mulan, I need you unharmed, so you’re Ruby’s backup.” He looked back at Belle, who had pulled out her dagger—Rumpelstiltskin’s dagger, Emma’s mind supplied, how in the hell did she get Gold’s dagger back?—and was standing as if just waiting for orders, eyes back to their hard set as if the slip had never happened.

“Shields?” Hook demanded.

“As they always are,” Belle answered.

Hook snarled, pulling the boat in seemingly random directions with a twist of his arms. “Not good enough, Belle, do you see how many there are?”

“Of course I saw,” Belle scoffed, and would have continued if Emma hadn’t interrupted.

“This might be my memories acting up,” she said. “But wasn’t Ariel on our side?”

“She’s supposed to be,” Belle answered.

Hook interjected, “but she’s not moving like Ariel, and if the Wicked Witch has control over Regina—”

“—she has all the other royals too,” Belle finished, and started walking to the front of the ship. “Especially Ariel.”

“Why especially?” Emma jogged to keep up.

“Ariel has a direct link her,” Belle threw the answer over her shoulder. “It was convenient at the time, the best option we had, but now—”

“—now you’re screwed,” Emma finished for her.

“Exactly.” Belle gave her a tight grin. “Tinkerbell!” With a puff of light green smoke, the fairy appeared at her shoulder, wings Emma would have sworn she didn’t have previously fluttering.

“What’s this about Ariel attacking us?” Tink asked.

“From over there—” Belle motioned to where the churning waves off to the side were getting bigger and closer. “—and Hook doesn’t think that the wards we set are strong enough.”

Tink harrumphed, likely at the insult to her skill, but conceded with a hand extended towards Belle. “Not sure how much stronger we could make it, but let’s—”

“I could help,” the words were out of Emma’s mouth before she’d consciously thought them, and Belle and Tink looked at her incredulously. “Look, my memories might not be up to par, but I can sparse through enough to see that I’ve done some pretty powerful shit with my magic, magic that you need right now.”

Tink and Belle seemed to have a silent conversation, and Tink seemed to win, grinning and bouncing off to the top of the ship.

Belle turned to her. “Alright,” she said reluctantly. “I suppose you can think of this as your first magic lesson.” She unceremoniously grabbed Emma’s hands, jerking them out palm up. “Remember last night?”

Emma nodded. Belle had done something with her magic (magic that Emma probably should have questioned her having, but was too exhausted (too hung up on Henry Henry where was Henry in her memories)), pulling and twisting her hidden memories so she could see them, but also somehow a Band-Aid around wherever the headache was coming from, sealing her off from the pain though Emma still knew it was there waiting.

“I want you to reach inside yourself, and pull out your magic to wrap around the ship exactly like I did with your memories.” And for some reason that was easy, something that had been just hovering inside her and she knew how to get at it (“Smell that? Smoke.”) A rusty-gold colored stream burst from her hands, wrapping around the ship like rope, like bandages, and knocking back the mermaids that had just reached the ship, sending them screeching back.

Emma blinked, then grinned. “I did it!” she exclaimed. “I—”

Another voice overtook her own, one she recognized as Ariel’s from the one time she’d talked to the girl at Granny’s welcome back party, but without any of the mermaid’s bubbling warmth. “An excellent accomplishment, Emma Swan.” The voice was like nails raking down a chalkboard, like ice cold fingers tapping down her spine. “The Wicked Witch sends her congratulations. Of course, you understand that you cannot be allowed to continue.” Before anyone could do anything, a bubble exploded from under the ship, engulfing it and expanding, rushing towards the horizon. “It was nice seeing you all again, especially you, Emma.”

The mermaids disappeared as if they had never been there. A beat of silence, and then—

“Damn!” The roared curse came from Hook. “Damn, damn, shit, damn—I can’t…Damn that Wicked Witch!”

“What happened?” Isis asked, frowning. A sense of dread engulfed Emma.

Hook swore again, hitting the wheel in frustration. “Blind Man’s Bluff,” he grunted. “Ariel, she—in one of the meetings we talked and she mentioned it offhand that mermaids could…” He spun around to face them, the entire crew having gathered in a semicircle around him at this point. “She said that mermaids, and sirens in particular, have ways of tricking and luring in sailors. There’s a reason they’re the bane of any seafaring man’s existence. One of them was Blind Man’s Bluff. Incredibly hard to do apparently, so it hasn’t been used in years. If they can do that, then it means—”

“But what does it do?” Ruby cut him off.

He sighed. “Blind Man’s Bluff is a trick on the eyes. Makes it look like, for miles around, there’s just open sea, and the sun doesn’t move, and you can’t move because you have no idea where you could be. It’s called that because you can bluff your way out of it by sailing in the same direction you have been, to get outside the bubble, but I knocked us off course when this started.” He hung his head. “We’re trapped.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I invite you to come yell at me if its been a couple months and this is still at two chapters.

**Author's Note:**

> Please inform me if anything is amiss (too OOC, inaccurate facts about various myths and fairy tales and such, etc)


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